


convince myself i am coming clean

by orphan_account



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Angst, Baphomet & Laura are Bros, Missing Scene, Smoking, cassandra only appears briefly but i love her so she had to be in it, everyone is sad, i love baph so much like please let him be happy, its only mentioned but baph has bruises, me? projecting my trauma onto fictional characters? more likely than you think, mentions of sakhmets death, they swear a lot, tw abuse, very anti-morrigan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 12:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14401812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Laura and Baph talk. Neither of them listen.





	convince myself i am coming clean

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first thing ive posted in months but like. i just finished wicdiv and i have a Lot of feelings. also i wrote this at 1am let me live.

Even in the middle of the throbbing crowd, the clanging of the fire escape and the familiar flash of black hair sticks out like a sore thumb to Laura, and she muscles her way through the throng of dancers until she’s out in the narrow alley where Baphomet had vanished to.

 

She glances around a little bit, squinting until she can make out his figure in the dark. He’s sitting hunched over against one wall with his arms resting on his knees and his head hanging.

 

After a moment Laura pauses, and crosses to sit on the opposite side against a considerably less-grotty wall than the one he’s leaning against. With a snap of her fingers she lights a cigarette and lets it dangle between her lips.

 

“Wanna talk about it?” She asks, smoke drifting from her lips in puffy clouds that float a little before disappearing.

 

He shakes his head. If he’s startled to see her, he doesn’t let on, doesn’t even move. She decides against offering him a cig, instead regarding him coolly through heavy eyelids. The flickering red neon lights outside the warehouse cast half his face in shadow and highlight his messy hair. Kinda like fire or something, she thinks. Kinda like blood.

 

“Wanna fuck?”

 

Again, he shakes his head, but this time it’s so sudden and violent she raises an eyebrow.

 

“Everything okay?” She asks coolly and takes another drag from her cigarette. Marlboro. Luci’s favorite, she notes with a twist of her stomach. Baal’s least.

 

“Fine, I just-” He breaks off and runs a hand through his hair. “Fuck. We’ve done enough already.  _ You’ve  _ done enough.”

 

Her stomach twists again and she has to resist the urge to get up right then and there and just fuck off. Maybe not even back to the party, just not here. Not her apartment either. Laura’s painted over the walls again and again, she’s changed the sheets again and again, but in a way she doesn’t think Sakhmet’s blood is ever gonna wash out. It might’ve been Minerva who took her head, but Laura knew deep down that it was all her fault. It always was.

 

Out of the corner of her eye she sees him hang his head and look at everything in the small dingy alley they’re slouched in apart from at her. Does everything  _ but  _ make eye contact.

 

Laura remembers the first time she ever saw him. Course, she’d heard of him before that. Although the Morrigan got far more fanfare than him, half the people at her high school and then, after she moved, her college raved about Baphomet the underworld god, lover of the Morrigan and total badass, complete with leather jacket and sunglasses.

 

The first time she’d ever seen him he’d been holding someone else’s severed head. To say it left an impression was an understatement.

 

(Course, it was a fake head, and the owner of said head had then arrived and tried to kill him, but, semantics.)

 

But when Laura got to know him,  _ really  _ know him, it’d been an entirely different story.

 

He was a prick, there was no way in hell around that, but he wasn’t the  _ bad  _ type of prick.

 

He wasn’t a prick who parked in disabled spots or yelled at customer service or posted bullshit like ‘#AllLivesMatter’ on his Twitter or, calamity of all calamities, voted for Trump.

 

He was the type of prick who didn’t realise how loud he was being in public restaraunts or used his shorter friends like armrests or told  _ terrible fucking jokes  _ then smirked while everyone else groaned or drew little hearts and smiley faces in the mist on the bathroom mirror for Laura to find when she showered in the morning.

 

He was, she thinks with a quirk of her lips, good bad company.

 

“I meant to talk t’you about that.” She says after a couple moments have passed, enough to be awkward. “I shouldn’t have pressured you into sleeping with me. I was selfish, and I-” Laura bites her lip and turns her head ever so slightly so she’s looking at him fully. “I didn’t think about what it’d do to you. I’m so sorry, Baph.” 

 

(The words ‘ _ About what  _ she’d _ do to you’  _ hang in between them like a noose neither is willing to climb into.)

 

When she’s finished, he looks almost shocked, and it makes her feel half angry and half sad.

 

Angry because she knows, she just  _ knows _ that this is one of the few- hell, even the first time that someone’s said sorry to him for something they did to him. Including the Morrigan, the  _ fucking Morrigan,  _ who’d given him a death sentence and put him on a fucking leash.

 

Sad, for the exact same reason.

 

Down in the underground Baph had told her everything. His parents, what he did to Marian.

 

It was bad- and she’d dealt with bad before. No excuses, he’d slept with another girl while he was dating Marian. He’d broken her heart.

 

But he was  _ mourning. _ It didn’t make it right, didn’t even come close, but Laura shuts her eyes thinks of Jenny’s face and then of her ripping Ananke apart.

 

(They may be gods, but none of them have been angels.)

 

“S’okay.” He replies after a second, his cool firmly regained. “You didn’t make me-”

 

“Don’t give me that shit.” She cuts him off before he has the chance to finish. “I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Let’s leave it at that.”

He nods and the silence returns, if only for a few seconds, but less awkward now and more comforting.

 

She turns back to take a drag and out of the corner of her eye, sees him wiping at his face, throat bobbing suspiciously.

 

The Morrigan’s words float into her mind in that moment:  _ The honest will hurt you just to feel clean. _

 

Looking at Baphomet, king of the underworld, reaper of souls, owner of a rad fuckin’ leather jacket, sitting next to her quietly crying she knows what the Morrigan said was bullshit.

 

Laura doubts Baph’s ever felt clean. He told Morrigan what had happened, (-what  _ Laura  _ had done-) because he’d known what she’d do to him for it and he thought he deserved it. Needed it, even, like Laura needs fire and flames and destruction, self or otherwise, to feel whole.

 

(Maybe that was why she fell in love with Sakhmet, because of how frequently they destroyed each other.)

 

(After all she was, as Ananke had put it, the destroyer.)

 

(And the destroyed.)

 

He wasn’t, Laura thinks with a burning anger twisting inside of her and the Morrigan’s sneer imprinted on the back of her eyelids, the type of  _ prick _ who hurt the person who loved them.

 

Baph had hurt Marian in a different way, but she thinks of Sakhmet curled up next to her on the bed and then of Sakhmet trying to claw Laura’s eyes out.

 

Lovers tend to do that.

 

But not like Marian had hurt him.

That night at the club when his glasses fell off and she saw his face, bruised and scarred- it had all come together like jigsaw pieces.

 

It should’ve been obvious the first time they’d met, when the Morrigan and Baphomet had their fight.  _ Gods do that,  _ Laura had thought at the time.  _ Lovers do not. _

 

“We were really worried about you.” She says and takes his lack of response as an invitation to continue. “Dio especially. He told me some of the things you two spoke about.”

 

“Dio doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Baph says sharply. “Keeps throwin’ all these fancy words out there, like-”

 

“Like what? Like ‘abuse’? ‘Cause that’s what it is.” She interrupts and the steel in her voice is enough to match his; more so, even. His eyes narrow.

 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He argues, voice rough.

 

“She doesn’t let you go out, doesn’t let you talk to your friends, watches  _ everything  _ you do, lies to you, speaks for you, does  _ shit like this-”  _ She gestures to the ugly purple marks flowering across his jaw, and he makes a hasty attempt to turn up the collar of his jacket. “-And you still won’t call it for what it is?”

 

He’s silent for a moment, shoulders slumped and knees hugged up to his chest like a little kid, not some fearsome god, and Laura’s heart breaks a little bit.

 

“I deserve it.” He says finally in the smallest voice she’s ever heard him speak in.

 

It breaks a whole-ass lot more.

 

“Fuck that.” Her voice softens and without really thinking she reaches across the small space between them to rest her hand on his. “No. You didn’t. You  _ don’t. _ That fucking  _ bitch  _ doesn’t get a say in that anyway. She doesn’t get to hurt you.”

 

There’s a shift in his demeanor as he lets his legs slide to the floor and tilts his head back. Laura notices his hand never leaves hers, almost clinging to it. “You’re overreacting.” He looks at her funnily. “It’s not that bad. It’s only ever  _ really _ bad when it’s Badb, and it barely ever is.”

 

_ It’s only really bad when it’s-  _ Laura clenches her jaw and her eyes harden. She’s going to fucking murder the Morrigan. The whole god damn trio if she has to. God or no, they’re dead.

 

“Are you fucking listening to yourself?” She grinds out and starts to stand up.

 

“Course I am, I just  _ looove _ the sound of my own voice.” He bites back and gets up as well so that he’s standing inches taller than she is.

 

_ Asshole. _

 

Before Laura has the chance to come up with a brilliantly witty response, the door of the fire escape bangs open and a pissed-off looking Cass comes storming out. The music from inside the warehouse briefly echoes out into the alley before the heavy door swings shut.

 

It takes a moment for Cass to notice the pair, too busy muttering angrily to herself so fast Laura can only catch the words ‘Dio’ and ‘fucking twit’ before she finally looks up and sees the two of them. “Oh, look!” She cries with her signature snark and a newly-regained composure, seemingly oblivious to the tension between the pair that had slowly begun to fizzle out. “It’s some rejected Twilight actors!”

 

“You’re in a fucking cape, Cassandra.” Laura says flatly.

 

“Fuck off, Dracula extra #2.”

 

“Dracula didn’t have extras.” Baph grins at her. He relaxes and leans against the wall, Laura is glad to see.

 

“I guess you’d know, Dracula extra #3.” She hisses back.

 

Her eyes widen almost comically as they flicker down to his bruised jaw, and before she can open her big mouth and set Baph off again, Laura intersects slightly louder than necessary.

 

“It’s fucking cold out here. Is Dio still partying?” She asks and stretches out her arms, yawning loudly and maybe slightly over the top.

 

“Course he is. He doesn’t  _ stop,  _ even if I ask him.” Class replies a little reluctantly as she tears her eyes away from Baphomet.  _ So that’s why she was pissed,  _ Laura guesses. “But-”

 

“Thank fuck. Let’s go.” Laura cuts in,  _ again,  _ and this time Cass glares at her and opens her mouth to say something.

 

She never gets the chance as Laura zips past her into the warehouse where the party is still in full swing, as it usually is, Baphomet in tow.

 

Thankfully, the rave is still in full swing with even more people than before packed into the cramped warehouse. 

 

“Listen, about the shit I said-” He begins as she drags him into the middle of the crowd.

 

“Forget it.” She lets go of his hands. “Let’s just forget it. Just for a minute.” The room lights up.

 

“You’re full of stars.” Laura feels herself start to glow. “You’re full of stars.”


End file.
